Cruise Connection
The Strange Escapes Voodoo Ghost Cruise is a spirited experience.
You expect spirits on a cruise — but in a glass, with a little paper umbrella, right? You don’t expect the kind of spirits you talk to and that, if you’re lucky, answer you back. That is, unless you’re on a Strange Escapes cruise, where paranormal investigators guide you through otherworldly, and sometimes haunted, experiences. ( Make no mistake: You do also have drinks with paper umbrellas. Can you even cruise the Caribbean without them?)
Strange Escapes is a travel company run by Amy Bruni, who started searching for spirits on SyFy’s Ghost Hunters and now stars on The Travel Channel’s Kindred Spirits. Bruni gathers groups of like-minded “weirdos” (their term, not mine) and brings them to haunted locations to swap notes, show off their newest ghost-hunting gear, and learn from the country’s leading experts in the supernatural. Under her guidance, I have found myself at midnight, standing in a freezing cemetery in New Hampshire’s White Mountains, talking to a haunted idol. Not to mention staying by myself in B314, the most bone-chillingly haunted room on The Queen Mary, which is now a permanently docked floating hotel in Los Angeles. I reiterate: I was completely alone. And there were ghosts. A lot of them.
Once a year, the weirdos convene for Strange Escapes at Sea, which embarks from a different port every cruise. Past trips have gone to Mexico to explore and investigate Mayan ruins, and to Bermuda, with an investigation of the Bermuda Triangle. ( If they found Amelia Earhart, well, no one is telling.) This was a Voodoo Ghost Cruise, which left from New Orleans on Carnival Dream with about 100 Escapees and a team of paranormal professionals. On the at-sea days, the experts gave lectures to the group. Greg and Dana Newkirk, who curate the Traveling Museum of the Paranormal and Occult, set up their array of haunted objects, like that aforementioned haunted idol. His name is Billy — Billy Idol, get it? — and if you catch him in a good mood, he’ll crack a joke or two. (Once, I heard Greg Newkirk ask Billy how many people were with us at the moment. Billy’s answer: “Alive or dead?”)
Before you ask, no, Billy isn’t animatronic. He’s a carved wooden statue they traced back to the late 1700s in Central Congo, which was found in a burlap sack under a house in Dayton, Ohio. The way you talk to Billy is through EVP sessions. Using a handheld recorder, you ask him questions, and if he answers, the recorder captures the electronic voice phenomena. This is the easiest way to talk to ghosts, by catching their EVP responses on recordings, which can perceive things our ears can’t.
Skeptical? I was too ... until I witnessed that “alive or dead” EVP happen in real time.
I wouldn’t call myself a believer, but I would describe myself as a para-curious observer who’s open to possibilities. I don’t own — and, unless my life takes a real left turn somewhere down the road, will never own — an SLS camera, which is a structured light sensor that locates energies (aka spirits) we can’t see. Nor do I own a spirit box, which is another way of hearing EVPs, but through headphones in real time.
This cruise was definitely not the place for unbelievers. Bruni and Adam Berry, her co-star on Kindred Spirits, gave a talk on “investigating with empathy.” Unlike other ghost hunters who try to provoke dramatic responses from the other side, these two
IF YOU CATCH BILLY IDOL, THE HAUNTED IDOL, IN A GOOD MOOD, HE’LL CRACK A JOKE OR TWO. ONCE, BILLY WAS ASKED HOW MANY PEOPLE WERE WITH
US AT THE MOMENT. BILLY’S ANSWER: “ALIVE OR DEAD?”
approach haunted situations from a different perspective. “You have to treat ghosts as if they’re people,” Berry said. “They were people. Investigating is about helping both sides of the veil — helping the spirits [if they need to be heard or want to deliver a message] but helping people who are living with and dealing with the ghosts. We’re trying to mediate the problem and give help to both sides.”
During another session, Dana Newkirk gave a primer on crystals: how to choose them and how to set intentions with them. John E.L. Tenney, a researcher and investigator of paranormal phenomena, UFOs, and the occult, kept the crowd rapt with two lectures. One was about magic and voodoo — how the ideas held by the average person about these practices have become overblown and hyperbolic. “Voodoo is a custom and a religion that’s gotten a bad rap because of Hollywood and television,” he said, “and because of fear of the unknown.”
The other lecture Tenney gave, appropriately, was about Atlantis, mermaids, and other legends of the deep, and how they play into our evolved fears of darkness and the unknown. “On our planet, the ocean is the last unexplored place,” he said. “For people who love ghosts and love being freaked out, being on the ocean is the perfect place. It seems bottomless, and you don’t really know what’s underneath you.”
Once on every cruise, Tenney conducts a group thought experiment. This time, he gathered willing Escapees on deck at night. Dana Newkirk gave everyone crystals to hold, and Tenney asked each person to set an intention. “Focus on one thing that’s holding you back,” he said. “Envision it as a bright star, and throw it into the sea.” All of a sudden, the clouds parted, the moon shone down, and the boat was swarmed by hundreds upon hundreds of brightly colored dragonflies, which are symbols of transformation and positive change. There was, Tenney said, “no reason why there was such an enormous swarm. They don’t migrate at that time, and they don’t swarm over open ocean.”
If things were inspirational on the ship, off it, they were downright creepy — especially at Rose Hall in Montego Bay. The White Witch of Rose Hall is a well-known legend in Jamaica. According to the lore, Annie Palmer, a practitioner of voodoo and witchcraft, murdered several husbands on the property, and was herself murdered and buried there. People in the group were walking through with their ghost hunting equipment, and many of them said that they felt as though they were touched by something, or had especially intense feelings in a room where a murder reportedly took place.
Just this past June, the Strange Escapes at Sea left from Galveston, Texas, and sailed the Gulf of Mexico and western Caribbean. It included conversations with Robert the Haunted Doll in Key West, and a tour of the most haunted locations — like the tunnels under Fort Charlotte — in Nassau. As of press time, it was unclear whether a ghost had followed anyone home from the cruise … but you really never know. With this group, though, someone was probably hoping one did.